What do we do about this?

I made this thread in the hopes that it could be used as a citation. There isn’t much we can do to stop the manipulation, but we can spread this information so that people can at least become aware of it.

The previous generation became somewhat aware of the manipulation in the media. Imagine how effective it would be if few people knew about it? That is what is happening today. We are being advertised to and subjected to propaganda without being aware of it, which is very dangerous. The only reason why this type of propaganda works so well is because most people trust comments and posts with a lot of upvotes and likes. Not only that, but this is becoming automated. We must educate others about this problem before we are drowned out by bots.

Some of this stuff is automatically removed by Reddit, so you have to link to a thread that was manually approved in order to cite the information. Reddit mods have also been known to blatantly remove links like this (4 examples here), so be sure that your comment or post actually shows up and stays up.

Share this blog post where you can or cite small bits of this post in your travels.

.

Actually, this information is not really easy to find. It is hidden because most people don’t know the right words to search. I’m not sure if that is deliberate or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was. If you google “shills” or “astroturfer,” most of the stuff in this thread will never be seen. Words that you have to plug into google:

Political Bots

Reputation Management

Online Marketing or online native advertising

Social Media management or manipulation

Paid Trolls

Paid comments

Here’s the thing about “reputation management”: This includes manipulating the search ranking of a google search. The people who are involved in this shadowy world of semi legal and illegal online marketing know tricks to pushing certain results to the 3rd or 4th page of a google search. Not only do you have to know the correct words to search for, you might not find it until you dig deep enough. I am also certain that I haven’t found everything. This post took me a very long time to put together.

.

Comments:

Oh, god. I’m sure I was arguing with one person in a similar position to the one in your screenshot some weeks ago in a youtube video about GMOs.

I’m not even completely against GMOs, I was mainly arguing that people should be aware of the problems that the current loose regulation in the US and EU could bring long-term. I understand that every people has it’s own opinion, and most of them were nice and wanted to add to the discussion, including some of the most adamant supporters of GMOs.

But there was one dude that was making me mad. He just spend all the time twisting my points, defending the industry (even when I didn’t attacked any firm in particular), and derailing all my topics. He followed most of the points you mentioned, included the one about conspiracy theories (when he asked me if I believed in the lunar landing lol).

I didn’t know exactly why, but that commenter left me with a very uncomfortable feeling that he wasn’t being honest, like when you see a politician talking in an interview. Now I’m pretty sure why. Thank you, you’re doing a very nice service to everyone on the internet.

My pleasure. I just re-read the first shill confession I linked you to and I noticed something; This confession was from like a year ago (archived link, so the timestamps are misleading).

He mentioned Facebook…

Do you think everyone on the data team at Facebook is a sociopath? I don’t work at Facebook; however, what do you think promoted posts, the selection of posts to show in your timeline, etc are, if not exactly the same as what I do? Remember, not long ago, Facebook got caught experimenting on humans using their website, intentionally trying to make their users happy or sad with their Timeline post selection algorithm.

It just came out a few weeks ago that FB does manipulate the trending news section, severely stretching the definition of “trending.”

Sockpuppets are to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent”. Sockpuppets are to “be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world.”

A special secure VPN, allowing sockpuppets to appear to be posting from “randomly selected IP addresses,” in order to “hide the existence of the operation.”

50 static IP addresses to enable government agencies to “manage their persistent online personas,” with identities of government and enterprise organizations protected which will allow for different state agents to use the same sockpuppet, and easily switch between different sockpuppets to “look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization.”

9 private servers, “based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer’s online persona(s) to appear to originate from.” These servers should use commercial hosting centers around the world.

There is not enough evidence to say without a doubt that the US government manipulates American social media, but we can say without a doubt that they do have sophisticated software for the purpose of spreading propaganda, they do manipulate social media, there are no longer propaganda laws preventing them from doing so in America, and multiple world governments have these programs in place (including but not limited to: Russia, China, Israel, and the UK.)

You can keep telling your self the US government would never manipulate social media, or violate the 4th amendment, or collect data en masse, or you can wake up and accept that this is the world we live in and ignoring it will never solve the problem.

Capt. Faggard and his Air Force Emerging Technology team is responsible for developing strategy, policy and plans for an ever-changing communication landscape for communicators worldwide. What was most interesting is that with Capt. Faggard leading the way, the Air Force employs 330,000 communicators! Their mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public. Yes, that’s right, the goal of the program is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator.

Besides Twitter, Capt. Faggard writes The Official Blog of the U.S. Air Force; has pages on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook; helps publicize a Second Life area called Huffman Prairie; contributes to iReport (user name USAFPA); and is on Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot,Newsvine, Reddit. There’s Air Force widgets. And there’s even a video mashup contest for high schools to show school spirit sponsored by the Air Force.

It’s not just the Air Force. Several months ago I led a training session organized by SSgt Alexis Mulero, Public Affairs Chief for the communicators in the 1st Marine Corps Recruiting District. Since most teenagers and young adults spend lots of time on Facebook, YouTube, and other social media sites, a major challenge in recruiting young people into the Marines is reaching them online. As a result of a focus on social media, SSgt Mulero says that his team has greatly increased the positive exposure of the Corps across the Northeastern U.S

Yes /u/utstudent4trump. That money worked a lot, where we have subs like /r/thedonald and /r/hillaryforprison frequently reaching the top of /r/all. How much money has trump used for spamming reddit? I guess we can leave out the fools who post nothing but HIGH ENERGY COMMENTS.

Israeli shills are ubiquitous on /r/worldnews. It’s actually fascinating to watch really. You see posts that are critical of Israel to begin with, have like +30 upvotes, then you come back several hours later, any post critical of Israel has -500 downvotes while anything that plays to Israel’s narrative is upvoted by the hundreds if not thousands.

On /r/politics, astroturfers from both sides are all over the place. It’s actually interesting to watch the Trump side’s strategy, is to constantly post negative articles about Clinton, so people distrust her. It’s on a board that actually leans center-left, you get top voted articles from Briebart and other far-right sources.

Mostly though, I see Astroturfers on news website comment sections and specialized boards. For example, here in Australia, one of our major forums is Whirlpool, which is just swimming in such blatant astrotufers I wonder how people continue to fall for their bait when they literally post like they are copy-pasting from a manual. Comment sections are always fun to watch astroturfers all use the same “key words” and “key statements” over and over again, then, by the end of the week, the Politicial group they are shilling for, starts to use those same key words.

Thank you so much for this. Just found this thread (and sub) and am awash with thoughts and emotions. You’ve confirmed what I’ve known deep down for a while now but had no evidence of. Perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough, because it’s clearly there. A lot of it. I wasn’t naive enough to think this wasn’t happening but this… this is… vilely rampant.

I suppose being forewarned is the first step to being forearmed but I’m still reeling with what to do with this knowledge.

Look up Search Engine Optimization. I used to work for a company that, among other things, offered SEO services, but it wasn’t always subtle. Like, imagine an apartment website where they changed the website title to “apartments in [town]” instead of the name of the complex and at the bottom, in small light grey letters, would say things like “equal opportunity housing affordable housing safe neighborhood pet friendly” despite being none of those things.

“Freedom of speech and its democratic corollary, a free press, have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion. This development was an inevitable result of the expansion of the media of free speech and persuasion, defined in other articles in this volume. All these media provide open doors to the public mind. Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens.” – Edward Bernays in “The Engineering of Consent” (1947).

With regards to HRC/CTR astroturfing ops, it’s worth noting that CGI partner Palantir (along with Berico and HB Gary) developed a “Persona Management System” in the past designed to allow single operators to bulk manage social media accounts, etc. – May be worth investigating too.

I got accused of being a shill for Israel during the last war with Gaza they had. I was just trying to defend what I saw as very tactfully executed bombings. They would call hours ahead and ensure everyone left the building. They would monitor to see that everyone left. I would remind people of the instances where the terrorists there were caught on drone video dragging children into the buildings to become the next martyrs. The bombs that did drop only leveled the building they needed to level, caused almost no damage to nearby buildings. It was like controlled demolition.